


One day we'll look back and laugh about it, together

by most_curiously_blue_eyes



Series: Long journey home [2]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, ignores canon after the bridge
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 23:47:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29908893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/most_curiously_blue_eyes/pseuds/most_curiously_blue_eyes
Summary: Daryl's found tapes with recordings of Rick's voice. They contain bits and pieces of Rick's journey over the years he's been missing. Will they help Daryl find him before an enemy he doesn't yet know about stands in the way of their much awaited reunion?Multi-chaptered sequel to "Wish upon a star".
Relationships: Daryl Dixon/Rick Grimes
Series: Long journey home [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2147178
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19
Collections: Daryl is gay/asexual so deal with it





	One day we'll look back and laugh about it, together

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gilven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gilven/gifts).
  * Inspired by [I'm still looking for him](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23303977) by [Gilven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gilven/pseuds/Gilven). 



> HELLO.
> 
> This story ignores canon completely because, frankly speaking, canon sucks from what I've been told. Mentions of richonne but I'm not tagging it 'cause it's not happening here.  
> It follows "Wish upon a star" directly and makes little to no sense without it, so please consider reading it first.

Hope is the worst thing a man can feel. It’s deceitful, like a light in the tunnel that turns out to be at the front of a roaring train rushing right at you to scramble you all over the tracks. If Daryl’s learned anything over the past almost six years, it’s not to trust hope, because the only thing it leads to in the end, is more despair. It’s a never-ending loop, where one little thing, almost meaningless on itself, is twisted by the mind into something almost resembling a sign, a clue, a feasible track; but soon enough, the veil lifts and what seemed like a sure-fire _this is it, this is the time_ turns out to have just been a soap bubble blown out of proportion, and it bursts. 

The recording of Rick’s voice may very well be that. A minute ago, listening to it, Daryl could’ve sworn it was Rick’s voice; but now, following the dog through the dark airport, he’s having doubts again. He hasn’t heard Rick talk in so long. He misses it, he replays their conversations in his head every minute of every Goddamned day, undoubtedly driving himself insane in the process. But memories aren’t trustworthy; and memories played on repeat like that are especially good liars. They superimpose themselves on top of reality, warping it so that the half-rotten, gory features of a long-dead walker seem terrifyingly familiar and white, cataracted eyes appear to be strikingly blue - even when they aren’t.  
Daryl’s heard voices before. He’s seen things that weren’t there, people absent from his life, even long dead. The tape recorder is a solid weight in his hand, but it doesn’t mean it’s real. Merle isn’t, but sometimes Daryl still gets woken up by a smack to the head and a high-pitched complaint that there’s no good beer left ‘round here, someone should have the brains to make some moonshine, what the fuck. 

It could be just a brick he’s staring at like it’s the answer to all his unsaid prayers. A vaguely rectangular rock. He could be hallucinating. But he heard it. He heard:

 _"-and I don’t know how much longer I can stay here,"_ said Rick’s voice on the recording after Daryl pressed play. _"_ _Wish I could just go home."_

So he can’t dismiss it. He can’t.

The abandoned airport is dark despite the clearness of the starry sky. The dog’s shape flickers in and out of Daryl’s vision, a darker shadow against the remaining fluorescent white lines painted on the concrete. The dog doubles back when it notices Daryl straying too far behind, and it barks once or twice, excited at what it must be thinking is a fun game. 

“C’mon, good boy,” Daryl mutters under his breath, “show me. Fuck. God, please, man. Let this be real. Let him be alive. C’mon.”

The dog leads him to one of the hangars at the far end of the airport: a place he had no plans to explore. What of interest could be in a hangar? He intended to look through the gift shops back at the terminal, maybe pick up a chocolate bar and an expired can of soda if he found any. The hangars held no promise of bounty, so Daryl simply dismissed them before. And yet… The moment he steps through the door, Daryl’s chest clenches painfully. He can tell the place is deserted, but it’s obvious someone used to live here not too long ago. The steady stream of light from his flashlight reveals the remains of a campfire in the far corner, a bedroll, and a few still unopened cans stacked by the wall. Whoever was here - _Rick,_ Daryl’s mind screams at him, _Rick was here,_ \- they left in a hurry, or they would’ve taken the food at least. Were they driven away by walkers, or pursued by some unknown assailants? 

The campsite is undisturbed, no walkers in sight, and no signs that anybody found it after it was abandoned. Nobody except for Daryl right now, and he’s too late. 

How much time has passed since the place was inhabited? Everything is covered with a layer of dust, and there’s a spider web between the two remaining logs in the campfire. So at least a few days, but Daryl knows it could as well have been weeks, or even years. The place is like a fucking museum, undisturbed by the weather conditions outside. There’s no telling if the person who lived here is still alive, and if they are, nothing points to where they went. 

But still, this is progress. There’s Rick’s voice on cassette tapes and a bedroll he slept in, and this is the closest Daryl’s been to his best friend in too fucking long. This is more than a fickle hope. Unless Daryl has completely lost his mind, he’s finally found his proof that Rick survived the bridge, and it’s more than he dared even imagine.

It’s a damn miracle is what it is.

“C'mere,” he says to the dog and he strokes along its muzzle, murmuring, “Good boy,” because without the dog, he wouldn’t have found any of this. And this? This is a start. There might be tracks, there might be some clues about what happened, why and when Rick left this place behind. 

If there are, Daryl can’t find them in the dark, though, and with a heavy sigh, he sits down on the dusty bedroll. It seems to be intact, not even eaten by moths, which is promising; from rubbing his fingers against the fabric, Daryl can tell it’s mostly cotton with just a mix of something synthetic. Would’ve been infested by insects if it had been here for a long time. He makes a mental note to investigate it further in the morning, see if there are any moth cocoons or other signs of age.

The discovery the dog led him to is making him restless. He wants to set out already, afraid that every moment he dawdles means Rick disappears further and further beyond his reach. Did Rick even know his own location? Why would he be hiding out here, not two hundred miles away from Alexandria, instead of going back home like he said he wanted to on that tape? Unless he was lost and was just following roads blindly, hoping to find something, anything to lead him to where he belonged. Did Daryl miss him on the road? Is Rick heading up to Alexandria right this moment, heading home, while Daryl is still out here looking for him?

“Wherever yer gone, I’m gonna find ya,” Daryl says softly, voice thick with promise. 

His attention is drawn again to the tape recorder in the satchel. He can’t look for tracks in the dark, but what if Rick’s tapes contain some sort of a clue? If not of his friend’s whereabouts, then maybe at least they have some explanation of where Rick had been the past five years and then some. Daryl frowns, looking at the hangar door. He’s got, by rough estimation, about four hours until sunrise. That’s enough time to listen to three or four of these tapes. Might as well start from the beginning and skip some parts if they’re not interesting. If he speeds through it, he might get to the last one before dawn.

Daryl sets the flashlight on a crate next to the bedroll, then looks through the cassette tapes to find the one with the lowest number. He briefly wonders what happened to number one since it’s not in the satchel nor anywhere he can see in the vicinity of the bedroll, but ultimately it’s not that important. He doubts tape number one is the one with information about Rick’s current heading. If he’s honest with himself, he’s only going to listen to all of them out of selfish reasons: he just wants to hear Rick talk for hours.

He’s that pathetic, but then again, maybe he deserves this indulgence as a reward for the long years on the road, looking for signs that weren’t there.

He puts tape number two in the recorder, rewinds to the beginning, and presses play.

 _“Day twenty-two, part two, I guess,”_ says Rick’s voice on the recording, and there’s a sound like somebody blowing air out of their mouth. A sigh. _“Don’t know why I’m doing this. I guess I’m hoping, maybe one day in the future, someone might find these next to my decaying body. An archeologist from the future might listen to my ramblings and get something useful out of them. Stories of a survivor from a lost civilization. Hah… I’m getting ahead of myself._

_“The good thing is, they haven’t found me yet. If there’s something Daryl managed to teach me, it’s how to cover my tracks in the woods. Those guys have their technology, but they ain’t trackers, not the way Daryl was. Is? God, I hope so. Not knowing is the worst part. How much time has passed? Are the people at home still alive? Are they okay? If only there was a way to contact them without drawing attention... The world before sure was nice with its cell phones and shit.”_

Daryl pauses the recording because he can feel the emotion overwhelming him. If he had doubts before, he doesn’t have them anymore. It’s Rick. It’s definitely Rick. The mention of Daryl’s name is solid proof of that.

He remembers what Rick’s talking about. Covering tracks. In the prison days, before they knew about Woodbury, the team came from a supply run empty-handed. Found signs of another group in the area, dangerously close to their territory. Daryl took it upon himself to teach their people to tread lightly in the woods, and in the event their attempts had failed, to make the terrain look like nobody went through there. Altering their tracks so they looked like a boar made them while rootling. Uprooting grass with sticks to make it seem like deer went there, not humans. Stuff like that, obvious to an experienced woodsman, but not to somebody who just happened to pass through looking for stuff to scavenge. 

Rick certainly learned that lesson better than how to walk without leaving a trail visible from a mile away. He was heavy-footed and clumsy in the woods, completely useless during hunts, but by the time Daryl was done teaching him, Rick was quite capable in the art of covering his route. 

If the knowledge helped him keep those unknown pursuers at bay, Daryl is all the more glad he taught him. Even more so because apparently Rick thought it important enough to mention on his tape. Rick thought Daryl’s name was important enough. It’s impossible to tell when exactly the tapes were recorded, _day twenty-two_ isn’t much of a pointer without a reference, but whenever it was, Rick _remembered_ Daryl. Thought about him, even if just in the context of useful shit Daryl had taught him. Still. It matters.

The dog whines softly and lays its head on Daryl’s thigh. Daryl strokes behind its ear and reaches for the food cans. The one at the top is tuna, and Daryl opens it to give to the dog. Another contains corn cream soup. It’s still edible. God bless America and its obsession with canning everything. Still makes for good eating almost a decade after the world went to shit. 

“Thanks, man,” Daryl mutters to nobody, or to the man who isn’t there, because it feels a bit like Rick left some of his food stash behind specially for him. Which is ridiculous, Rick couldn’t have known that it’d be Daryl to find this place. He didn’t even know Daryl was alive when he was recording that second tape. But there’s nobody there but Daryl and the dog, so nobody’s gonna judge him if he pretends for a minute. 

As he eats, he presses play on the recorder again. 

_“I think I crossed a state line today. Not like it matters, but I remember talking to Daryl about state lines a long time ago. He’d never been outside of Georgia before all this. Man, I’m thinking, he may have had the right idea. We never should have left Georgia. After the prison, we should’ve found something else. Why’d we ever gone north?_

_“No, really, I’m wondering. There are so many places down south we could’ve holed up in. So many good places. How much effort would it have been to find a town like Woodbury and make it our own? Or a school. A rehab center! Not to mention any government buildings anywhere in the state. Anything could’ve worked, and yet there we went, looking for something ready-made. We just wanted to be saved, I guess. Can’t count on others to save you in this world, though. We should’ve known.”_

_“Day twenty-seven. Couldn’t record in the last few days. I spotted them before they spotted me. I think I lost them again, but God only knows. Found this place. Some sort of… bunker? Seems like. It’s dark, stinks like something died down here, but I haven’t found any walkers. Found water, though. Just in case, I won’t be opening any doors. Only gonna spend the night anyway._

_“I remember watching a show. Lori was angry with me ‘cause I forgot her mother’s birthday, so she delegated me to the couch for the night. Our couch was the worst, like, a literal back-breaker torture device. Couldn’t sleep on it, though I guess everything’s relative ‘cause I’d probably have the best night’s sleep on it nowadays. Anyway, I couldn’t sleep, so I turned on the TV real low, and there was this show about preppers on it. I remember thinking, those guys are damn lunatics, packing their life savings into bunkers and non-perishables. Guess what? Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, and next time I think someone’s doing something stupid, I’m gonna kick myself in the head and do the same thing. Just in case.”_

_“Day thirty! It’s been a month. I’ve been out here a month. I have no idea where I am or where I’m going, but man, does it feel good to be free. If anyone asks, freedom beats safety, any day. I’d rather face herds of walkers out here than go back to that compound where I’d never have to see a walker again. It’s the fresh air, the wind on my face. The choice to pick my own time and place to die, I guess.”_

“Don’cha dare,” Daryl mutters darkly. The dog perks up, looks up at him, wags its tail a few times and then goes back to his meal. Daryl says, “Dramatic fuck,” and he doesn’t like how the insult is just a cover, a convenient way to hide the sudden feeling of dread spreading tightly through his chest at the thought that maybe he’s listening to Rick’s farewell. Maybe when Rick left this place Daryl’s now inhabiting, he went out to die. Maybe in the morning, Daryl will go out there searching for his lost best friend, only to find a skeleton with a hole in its head and a gun in its hand, and that’ll be it. 

Coda.

“I won’t forgive ya,” he says softly, and Rick’s voice in the recording says, _Life just sucks sometimes,_ as if in reply, and Daryl has to pause the tape for a moment because he’s this close to throwing the damn recorder against the wall.

Rick just has this way of riling him up, even when he’s not there. 

_“Day thirty-six. Just saw a road sign pointing to London. Had a laugh. London! Made me wonder, do they have walkers in Europe? I don’t know. Do I hope they do so they’re as miserable as us? But then, if they don’t, maybe they’ll eventually come rescue all us sorry fuckers here. I mean, they wouldn’t just watch us on TV like some fucked-up reality show, would they?_ Keeping up with the walking dead. _Why do I get the feeling Michonne would watch the hell outta that?_

_“Damn, I miss Michonne.”_

“She misses ya too, man,” Daryl says softly. He hopes that unlike him, Michonne was finally able to move on. She’s strong, so much stronger than he is. For Daryl, it’s always been wishful thinking that he could go it alone. _I’m better on my own,_ he used to say, but it was never true. He craved acceptance, he craved the sense of community; sick of always being the outsider looking in, he wished for once he could become a part of something. A family. And he did, for a while. 

When it all fell apart, so did he; but Michonne took the blow and stood her ground. She’s unbreakable. Invincible. Rick chose wisely when he fell in love with her. He chose wisely and Daryl had had no choice but to accept it because he had no right to begrudge the two of them happiness, even though for a moment there he believed- he hoped-

The dog finishes his tuna and whines softly, so Daryl lets it lick his can clean of the leftover soup; suddenly, his appetite is gone. 

_“Day forty-eight. Still can’t believe I made it so long. I was never good on my own. Ain’t like Daryl or Michonne. And yet here I am, forty-eight days evading those guys. You’d think they’d be better at tracking their fugitives, but thank God, they’re not. Then again, I don’t suppose there had been fugitives before me. I would’ve known._

_“By the way, abandoned gas stations are so weird. I just found a bag of crackers locked in a safe. It was an old manual lockbox, I expected to find a gun. Maybe money. Nope. A bunch of stale crackers and a vial of viagra. I’ll leave the viagra to whoever may need it. I don’t think it’s gonna be very useful to me. The crackers are good, though.”_

_“Day fifty. Nothing new to report. I’ve been keeping to the woods, but trying to walk parallel to the highway. Found some berries. Seems like they were edible ‘cause I’m still alive. Next time I’m in a town, I’m finding a library or a bookstore and getting an encyclopaedia of edible plants. I suck as a hunter, but I could be a great gatherer, I just know it.”_

_“Day fifty-three. Walked east. At least I think it’s east, but I may have taken a wrong turn at some point. It’s difficult to tell in the woods. Weather is nice. Saw a deer. Weird thing: it wasn’t scared of me. I wish I had Daryl’s crossbow. The gun could work, but it’s loud, and I don’t want to draw attention. Anyway, what would I do with a whole deer? I don’t even know how to skin it right. I’ll just leave hunting to actual hunters, I guess. Bambi has nothing to fear from me.”_

_“Day fifty… eight? I think. Hard to say. Hiding in this basement. I spotted their helicopter three days ago. They saw me, I’m sure of it, they’ve been flying in circles above this area since then. I thought I was finally out of their range. Damn, I never should’ve gone east, it’s my own fault. I got cocky, I thought… Well, I thought they’d let me go back. I’ll try to go out tomorrow, see if they’re still circling around. Then back west it is.”_

“West, huh,” Daryl says, and makes a mental note about it. Tape number two was probably a long time ago, but it’s still possible Rick decided to head out west from Lynchburg when something spooked him enough to drive him away from this cozy camp.

And, hell, what’s up with Rick and his goddamn helicopters?

_“Day sixty-three. I’m out of food, I have no idea where I am, but I’m positive I lost them again. It’s not easy to outrun a helicopter. I’ll be moving around at night from now on, whenever I can. Harder to spot me from above. To do list: find some camo clothes. I’m going full undercover. They can’t get me if they can’t see me.”_

_“Day eighty-two.”_

The tape ends, and Daryl flips to the B-side, leaning more comfortably against the wall. Rick’s deep voice lulls him to a sort of semi-conscious slumber and Daryl doesn’t try to fight it. He hears everything, he registers the words and their meaning, but it’s a bit like he’s dreaming. Hearing Rick talking right next to him, it’s almost like a dream in itself, a familiar, comforting dream. 

The dog curls up by his legs and sleeps, snoring lightly, and Daryl listens to Rick’s account of a long trek in the woods. He smiles when Rick talks about a campsite he found, with a tent that reminded him of the one Daryl used to have back in the quarry and on the farm. 

_“It’s almost like I’m back in time. Wish I could go back. So many things we could’ve done better. So many deaths could’ve been avoided if only I weren’t so stupid back then. Everyone’s got regrets, that’s how humans are wired I think, but. A lot happened that’s on me. Started with Shane and it just never ended, did it? I still see them sometimes, and I wouldn’t call them dreams. They talk to me. Accuse me. It’s harder to not let it get to me when I’m alone. It was easier before, with Michonne there for me. With Daryl. Though I hadn’t been there for him, had I? So many bad decisions, but still he stood by me. There was a moment there when I wondered-”_

The tape ends abruptly.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm literally always on tumblr at most--curiously--blue--eyes and yet nobody comes to scream at me there. You can!


End file.
